Alvelal
🌐A collaborative alliance operating across over 1 million hectares in southeastern Spain, using Commonland's Four Returns Framework to reverse desertification and restore prosperity. Since 2014, AlVelAl Association has grown to more than 490 members including 280 farmers, developing regenerative businesses and coordinating landscape-scale restoration through the Altiplano Regeneration Manifesto, community machinery banks, and regenerative education programs that merge art, biodiversity, and emotional connection to land.
Bioregional Context
The Altiplano Estepario spans five districts at the intersection of Almería, Murcia and Granada, three provinces belonging to Spain's southernmost region, Andalucía. It is a semi-arid steppe and transition zone between desert and Mediterranean forest. The bioregion encompasses over 1 million hectares across more than 80 municipalities. Water has always been scarce in this landscape, yet the area has been home to human settlements for centuries. Desertification and extreme climate conditions, combined with unsustainable land management practices, have reduced local biodiversity and climate resilience, making this a challenging landscape for local communities.
- Network Affiliation
- Commonland
- Tags
- Participatory Strategies 4 Returns Habitat Connectivity Vegetation Planting Watershed Repair Ecological Monitoring Regenerative Agriculture Farmer Support Demonstrator Site Resource Hub Peer Learning Value Chain Development Visitor Experiences Learning Programs Art and Storytelling Result Based Mechanisms Finance Assesments Structuring and Capitalization
Background
The Altiplano Estepario spans five districts at the intersection of Almería, Murcia and Granada, three provinces belonging to Spain's southernmost region, Andalucía. This landscape is a semi-arid steppe—a large area of flat unforested grassland—that forms a transition zone between desert and Mediterranean forest. The bioregion encompasses over 1 million hectares across more than 80 municipalities, creating a vast territory where water scarcity has shaped human settlement patterns for centuries.
Despite these challenging conditions, the economy today is mainly based on agriculture, with traditional farming and pastoral activities playing important cultural and economic roles. Yet the landscape tells a story of both loss and potential. Mediterranean forests once covered vast areas of the territory—trees like oaks and evergreen shrubs such as thyme and rosemary. However, desertification and extreme climate conditions, combined with unsustainable land management practices, have reduced local biodiversity and climate resilience. This leads to both social and economic losses as young people leave and entrepreneurship becomes increasingly difficult.
Origins and Network
Since 2014, Commonland's landscape partner AlVelAl has been using the 4 Returns Framework to bring together local farmers, conservationists, government, and entrepreneurs to create a common vision for the territory. The alliance is made up of several entities that have a common vision of achieving the regeneration of this territory.
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As one director reflects: "At the moment people move away from the region to find work. I'm inspired by being part of a project that transforms a territory for the younger generation, so that my daughters can choose to live here."
Activities
Altiplano Regeneration Manifesto
The common challenges facing the territory—environmental degradation, social loss, and economic uncertainty—inspired entities from across the region to unite and create a common manifesto. The manifesto serves dual purposes: acting within the territory to regenerate and revitalize it for maximum positive impact, and serving as a powerful tool to influence regional, national, and European policies. They have united, represented in the town councils, more than 200,000 people, creating a significant collective voice for bioregional regeneration. This manifesto is designed to inspire people from different organizations to join, while also devising ways to cooperate, create networks, and build synergy between territories to inspire each other.
Natural Ecosystems Restoration
Restoration focuses on natural areas and how they connect to working farmland. On priority sites such as La Muela, partners work to recover vegetation, soils, and water retention. On farms, agreements identify where to restore natural zones alongside production, with measures to hold water and soil and to build biodiversity. Corridor initiatives extend habitat connectivity so natural patches and productive land form a coherent mosaic.
Regenerative Agriculture Transition
One of the initial goals has been to help align stakeholders and shift from the development of almond monocultures and intensive agricultural and livestock farming practices to mainstreaming regenerative practices and developing the regional market for them. More than 100,000 hectares of rain-fed almonds grow in the AlVelAl Territory, creating huge potential for business-driven restoration. Regenerative techniques are known and work, but cultural adoption is a long-term process requiring patient support and demonstration of both ecological and economic benefits. The alliance backs the transition with education and training, farm-level assessments for farms that want to change practices, research and monitoring to document what works, demonstration farms that show regenerative management in real conditions, and early-transition support so farmers can absorb risk in the first years of change.
Ecoregenerative Certification
Ecoregenerative Certification is a voluntary standard for farms that are already organic and want to show they go further: they manage land in ways that improve soil, water, and biodiversity, not only meet organic rules. That gives farmers, cooperatives, and buyers a clearer story in the market—consumers can trust the claim because it is checked against regenerative practice, not just the word on a pack. The standard applies to the main crops of the Altiplano: tree crops such as almond, olive, pistachio, grape, and walnut; field crops such as cereals and legumes; and aromatic herbs. Rules are tuned to each farm and crop rather than applied as a one-size-fits-all list, so the same seal can mean something serious whether the holder is a grower, a cooperative, or a brand further down the chain.
Regenerative Agriculture Machinery Bank
To practice regenerative agriculture, specific machinery is needed, and not all farmers can afford the full range of machines required. Farmers in the area decided to create a community machinery bank, sharing equipment among members. The bank now counts 61 members, demonstrating how resource sharing enables broader adoption of regenerative practices. The cooperative combines equipment access with collaborative learning. They have developed a network for shared farming tips ("truquillos")—those little secrets that farmers share with each other when they have trust and complicity. This approach recognizes that knowledge sharing is as important as resource sharing in building a regenerative agricultural movement.
Regenerative Value Chain Development
The work has developed three regenerative businesses now in operation: an almond-focused company (Almendrehesa), an olive oil cooperative (Habitat), and a food platform (AlVelAl Foods) to sell regenerative products from across the territory. These businesses provide farmers with premium prices for regenerative products while supporting the transition to regenerative practices. 43 locally run businesses have benefited from increased access to new markets and value chain infrastructure, creating economic opportunities that align with ecological restoration goals.
Ecotourism Development
Tourism is developed as a way to connect visitors to landscape regeneration and local culture—not as undifferentiated growth. Programs highlight stewardship, identity, and creative engagement with the Altiplano, so that travel reinforces the same regeneration story the alliance pursues in agriculture and nature.
Education Alliance
They hold that regenerating the landscape requires a shift in how people feel and think about land. The alliance pools energy, talents, knowledge, and experience toward that end, with the vision that regeneration becomes lived practice, not only a technical agenda. They pursue two main lines of work: a shared framework of knowledge and competencies for what regenerative education means in the territory, and a social strand that stresses cohesion and cooperation—because landscapes are shared, not individual. The “Regenerando Mariposa” / “Regenerating Butterfly” concept— involving the collective planting of butterfly shaped landart sculptures made from aromatic herbs–—ties art, creativity, and biodiversity regeneration into learning that can inspire wider society.
Landscape Finance Strategy
The landscape partnership first ran a 4 Returns finance assessment with AlVelAl, allied foundations and enterprises, and Commonland—mapping real interventions and their costs. The results (to early 2025) put total identified need around €177.5 million on a five-year view, with about half of that in grant-like capital. Building on that diagnosis, AlVelAl and Commonland are developing a landscape finance strategy with partners inside the territory and beyond, testing promising mechanisms such as collaboration with the European Investment Bank, cajas rurales (rural savings banks), and other instruments still taking shape—so public, community, and private capital can meet the landscape.
Vision and Legacy
The vision by 2034 is clear: the AlVelAl Territory becomes a regenerative landscape where nature and agriculture are in balance. An ecological corridor connects the region's mountain ranges. Farms with both natural and productive lands form a mosaic of biodiversity hotspots, which act as stepping zones between natural areas. Rural abandonment is reversed as young people return and find new opportunities. The area continues to regenerate, led by a group of diverse, inspired local stakeholders.
Current progress includes: 71 initiatives including art projects, demo pilots, and farms, available to raise awareness for local communities; 216 farmers implementing improved management practices in line with regenerative agriculture; 14,509 hectares under direct improved management and restoration in combined and natural zones; and 43 locally run businesses benefiting from increased access to new markets and value chain infrastructure.
The Altiplano Estepario continues to serve as a lighthouse example of holistic landscape restoration based on the 4 Returns Framework in drylands areas, inspiring other initiatives across Spain and Portugal as they work toward creating a 4 Returns Network across the Iberian Peninsula. This approach recognizes that ecological restoration must work alongside economic activities, creating a mosaic where natural areas connect through productive landscapes managed regeneratively.